To Step Into The Miraculous, Step Into The Mission

The Link Between the Miraculous and the Mission That Most People Miss

There is a pattern running through the Bible that is easy to overlook. Miracles do not tend to happen to people sitting comfortably at home. They happen to people who are actively engaged in God's mission — often in the most inconvenient and uncomfortable places.

John Harding brought this observation to Crowd Church with the kind of directness that comes from someone who has actually tested it. His title said it all: if you want to step into the miraculous, step into the mission.

Angels, Prison Doors, and Going Right Back

The passage is Acts 5:17-26. The religious authorities, consumed by jealousy at the growing church, have the apostles arrested and thrown into jail. During the night, an angel opens the doors and leads them out. So far, so dramatic.

But here is the part that gets overlooked. What did the apostles do next? They did not go home. They did not lie low. They did not take a well-earned break. "They went straight back to the same place and continued to preach the same message that had just got them arrested," John said.

They went right back to the mission.

Christianity Minus the Miraculous

John made a statement early in his talk that deserves to be sat with: "You simply cannot have Christianity without the miraculous. Christianity minus the miraculous is dead religion."

The resurrection itself is a supernatural event. The Holy Spirit coming at Pentecost was supernatural. The transformation of cowering disciples into bold witnesses was supernatural. Strip the miraculous out of the story and there is nothing left.

And John was clear that this is not just ancient history. "As a disciple of Jesus, I still believe in and we still experience miracles. Sometimes in some places we experience lots of incredible miracles. At other times in other places, we experience fewer miracles."

The variable, he argued, is mission. "What I see in the Bible and what I have observed in my own life is that there is a clear link and relationship between the mission and the miraculous."

Brother Yun and the Prison That Nobody Escapes

To illustrate this, John shared the story of Brother Yun, a leader of the Chinese underground church whom he has met three times. Brother Yun was imprisoned by the communist regime for leading the secret church. In prison, he continued the mission — many prisoners and guards came to faith. He was frequently beaten for it.

Then God sent angels to open his cell door. He walked out of Hangzhou prison — a facility from which, they claim, nobody has ever escaped — unseen by any of the guards, every door opening as he went.

"He walked straight back into the mission that God had called him to," John said. The miraculous and the mission, bound together.

University Students in Bulgaria

John then brought it closer to home. He described taking a team of ten university students from Liverpool to Bulgaria, one of the poorest countries in Europe. Each evening they would drive into the mountains, go to rural churches, perform dramas, play music, and preach the gospel.

Then they would offer to pray for the sick. Some of the students had never prayed aloud for anyone before. Some had never prayed for healing.

"Two of our students prayed for an old lady in a Roma gypsy church. They didn't have a translator. It was all a bit confusing, but they prayed anyway."

Halfway through the prayer, the old lady jumped up and ran out of the church, across a bridge and over a river. The students were baffled. Five minutes later she came back with her entire family. The translator explained: she had suffered severe knee pain and could hardly walk. God had healed her knees.

Mission and the miraculous, hand in hand.

A Dead Cow and a Healed Ear

The story that perhaps landed most powerfully was about John's own son. On a family holiday in France, the boy — around ten or eleven years old — developed a severe ear infection after swimming in a river. His ear was bright red, the canal had closed up, his neck glands were swollen, and he was in significant pain.

It was a Sunday in France. Everything was shut.

"So we decided to pray for him for healing and we anointed him with oil like we're instructed to do in James 5:14. And in seconds, within seconds, the redness went, the ear canal opened up and the inflammation in his glands totally disappeared."

John added, almost as an aside: "Later on we found upstream a dead bloated cow floating in the water." Which puts the infection into context.

The lasting impact was not just the healing itself. "When someone wants prayer for healing now, my son will be the first person there to pray because that was his experience and so he believes God can do it for others."

The Meeting Place Is the Training Place

John referenced John Wimber's idea that the church meeting is the training ground for the marketplace. What happens on a Sunday is not the end goal. It is preparation for what happens on Monday, Tuesday, and the rest of the week.

"Acts shows us that the vast, vast majority of miracles and supernatural events don't happen to Christians in a church building," John observed. "The vast, vast majority of miracles take place for non-Christians outside of the church building, in the mission of day-to-day life."

He shared his own practice of approaching people in the city centre: "Hi, I'm John. I'm the leader of the local church. I'm out praying for people. Can I pray for you for anything?"

Sometimes they say no. Sometimes they say worse. Often they say yes. He prayed for his neighbour's gout and the swelling disappeared instantly. Other times, nothing visible happened. But even then, he noted, people almost always appreciate being prayed for.

What About When It Does Not Work?

John addressed the elephant in the room directly. At a conference in Denmark, church leaders asked him what happens when people are not healed.

His answer was pointed: "The risk of someone not getting healed and then getting discouraged is not a good enough reason in itself to not pray for the sick."

He also made an observation that shifts the conversation. When you pray for non-Christians outside the church building, many of the problems around disappointment simply disappear. "The people we are praying for don't have a bad theology that they've picked up from church. They don't have any theology about it."

They just appreciate that someone cared enough to stop and pray.

The Training Ground of Your Everyday Life

Sharon Edmundson admitted in Conversation Street that the talk was "a bit of an ouch" for her. "I was like, ooh, I don't really see much of the miraculous. It did make me think how much do I actually get distracted by daily life."

She shared that after hearing the talk the first time, she texted several people she had been meaning to follow up with — conversations that had started naturally but she had not pursued.

Matt reflected on how the miracles they had seen through Crowd Church tended to involve people who were either very new Christians or not yet Christians. "We don't tend to see a lot of the miracles inside the church building. We tend to see a lot of them outside the church building."

A Simple Prayer

John finished with a prayer drawn from the angel's words in Acts 5: that we might go and proclaim the full message of this new life.

Not a complicated prayer. Not a formula. Just a willingness to step into the mission and see what God does.

The pattern is there for anyone willing to test it. Step into the mission — whether that is a conversation at the school gate, a prayer for a neighbour, or a trip to rural Bulgaria — and watch what happens. The miraculous tends to show up where the mission is already underway.

What would it look like to make yourself available this week?